The Metal Gear series, produced by Konami in 1987, is the Trope Maker and Trope Codifier of the Stealth-Based Game genre. The idea came when the series' creator and lead designer, Hideo Kojima, realized that the MSX2 couldn't show more than a few enemies at a time without flashing epileptically and generally breaking — so why not make a game where avoiding your enemies is the theme? This concept received a lot of criticism — one famous quote from Kojima's boss is, "Hiding from your enemies? That's not a game!". But then they started playing it. And it became quite a hit, spawning a great many sequels (with countless ports and editions):

Games in the Metal Gear Franchise

Main Titles

Metal Gear Solid: Integral (1999, PS1)note The bonus VR Disc for the PlayStation version was released by itself overseas as Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions in North America and Metal Gear Solid: Special Missions in Europe. (2000, PC)

Metal Gear Solid 2: Bande Dessinée (2008, DVD) (2013, Blu-ray) - A voiced motion comic adaptation of both MGS graphic novels by IDW. Originally released only in Japan, it later got an English release when it was included as part of The Legacy Collection.

Collection Sets

Metal Gear 20th Anniversary: Metal Gear Solid Collection (2007) - A box set released exclusively in Japan that includes MGS and MGS2 in their original Japanese editions, plus the Subsistence edition of MGS3 (first disc only), The Document of MGS2, a bonus PS2 disc featuring the MSX2 games (as they appeared in Subsistence), the PSP game MPO in a special UMD case and a Metal Gear Saga DVD Video, essentially including all the canonical Metal Gear games prior to MGS4.

Metal Gear Solid: The Essential Collection (2008, PS2) - The international equivalent of the previous set. It includes the original PS version of MGS in a PS2-style DVD case, as well as the Substance and Subsistence editions of MGS2 and MGS3, respectively. Unfortunately, it's missing the MSX2 games, despite the fact that they were included in the previous Japanese set.

Metal Gear Solid: HD Collection (2011, PS3/Xbox 360/PS Vita) - A collection featuring HD editions of MGS2, MGS3 and (except on Vita) PW. The MSX2 games are also included as part of MGS3. The Japanese version of the collection lacked PW, which had a separate physical release instead, but the PS3 release made up for it by including a product code to download the original MGS on the PlayStation Network.

Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection (2013, PS3) - A collection of every canonical game directed by Kojima (leaving out MPO and MGR), which means every game previously included in the HD Collection, plus the original MGS and MGS4. As a bonus, this set also includes the VR Missions/Integral expansion and both Digital Graphic Novels for the first time in Blu-ray Video format.

Chronological order of the series (ambiguously canon entries are in parentheses):

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater - 1964

(Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops - 1970)

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker - 1974

Metal Gear Solid V

Ground Zeroes - 1975

The Phantom Pain -1984

Metal Gear - 1995

Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake - 1999

Metal Gear Solid - 2005

(Metal Gear Solid: Mobile - 2006)

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

Tanker chapter - 2007

Plant chapter - 2009

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots - 2014

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance - 2018

The plot is far too complicated (and occasionally batshit crazy) to write here in any detail. A former CIA Agent going by the codename "Naked Snake" made a name for himself as a mercenary commander during the Cold War, infamously known across the world as "Big Boss." Eventually, he returned to America and helped the US Army train an elite black-ops unit known as FOXHOUND. Later, his biological son inherited his father's former codename, becoming equally famous as "Solid Snake." While the two go through similarly action-packed and harrowing experiences throughout their careers, they come out of it with very differentideologies. Fighting a vast global conspiracy which secretly rules the world, their adventures also invariably revolve around the titular Metal Gears — walking battle tanks capable of launching nuclear strikes from any geographic position. A major theme is the spiritual cost of being a soldier. Particularly in a post-Soviet/World War II world in which battles are not always fought for great ideological or religious causes, but are prolonged, brutal proxy wars, where soldiers are sent to die, and then discarded when they're no longer useful. If that's not enough explanation for you, we do have a Synopsis page for you to check out.

The series loves breaking the fourth wall and has a distinct quirky sense of humor—running jokes involve the iconic use of a cardboard box to sneak around a base (wait until nobody is looking, run to a new location, and repeat). Another trademark is a general tendency for each new installment in the series to retcon at least one more-or-less significant plot detail about at least one of its predecessors. Kojima's irreverence is such that he's been trying to kill the series off since Metal Gear Solid 2 made its protagonist switch, so he can get on with more interesting things, but a rabidly devoted fanbase simply won't let him.

One of the most engaging parts of the games is the huge focus on multiple uses for items; for example, whilst smoking cigarettes seem like a gag item that just drains your health and earns you a lecture from your contacts, they come with the hidden bonuses of showing laser beams with the smoke, and allowing for steadier aiming by calming your nerves. Metal Gear was also a pioneer of non-lethal gameplay. Every title in the series after Metal Gear Solid allows the player to complete the game without killing enemy soldiers. There are pros and cons to each approach, and the player's willingness or refusal to kill becomes a plot point in several stories.

Following the initial Metal Gear, each game has been a deconstruction of action movies and video games, playing tropes so painfully straight they curve right back in on themselves. Very few tropes are invoked without logically following them through, especially those of spy movies - we see exactly what kind of mind and complete control of a situation would be needed to pull off the absurdly complex Gambit Roulettes that happen once per game, exactly what happens to a tykebomb forced to take up a normal life, and there's a female on male sexual abuse subplot which is not at all okay, to name just a handful.

Solid Snake began as a Deconstructed Character Archetype of the Action Hero trope, as his wartime experiences had not turned him into the ultimate action hero, but into a bitter, broken-down wreck of a soldier who just wanted to retire but could not escape the life of conflict that had entwined him for so long. After fans missed the point slightly, this theme was hammered home with Raiden, who was put through the same torments as Snake in explicit detail. Not even Big Boss is immune to this theme: as Naked Snake, he's not the suave, impeccable agent that would fit perfectly into the '60s spy film pastiche of Metal Gear Solid 3, but a likable, kinda-dorky (though admittedly brilliant at what he does) everyman. Only after going through immense psychological and physical scarring does he begin to resemble the ultimate soldier known as Big Boss.

The series is acclaimed for a lot of good reasons — stellar gameplay, superb boss fights, very complex plots with pitch perfect deconstructions, excellent direction, intelligent character development and weird stylized dialogue. Just prepare for a lot of cutscenes. A lot of cutscenes. As in Metal Gear Solid 4 seriously holds the world records for both "longest cutscene"note Said instance clocks in at 27 minutes. and "longest cutscene sequence."note The 71 minute ending and epilogue sequence that wraps up the entire series arc (excluding the later-released Big Boss prequels). Honestly, you play the game for two-fifths of the time and watch a full-length movie the other three-fifths, though if you like the plot you probably won't mind too much.

The 2013 spinoff game Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, features Raiden, a controversial bait-and-switch protagonist who has certainly Taken A Level In Badass since his introduction in Metal Gear Solid 2. Although stealth is present to some extent, it is an (very over the top) action game, becausePlatinum.

Finally, there's Metal Gear Solid V, released in 2014/2015 and, following his departure from Konami, Hideo Kojima's last entry for the series. Acting as the first Wide Open Sandbox and (as of yet) the finalé to the Metal Gear saga, the game is split between a stand-alone prologue and main game, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain respectively. The story chronicles the remaining gaps in the Big Boss story, detailing the final steps that pushed him into Greater-Scope Villain for the main series, and finally bringing the story full circle with a (rather predictable) cliffhanger for Metal Gear. The Phantom Pain has met universal acclaim for its innovative game engine (dubbed the Fox Engine), gorgeous graphics, well written story, great exploration of some very serious themes, and its extremely deep and addictive gameplay.

Please do not dump tropes that only apply to specific games on this page; put them on the appropriate pages or on the character page. This page is for tropes that appear several times throughout the series.

The Metal Gear series provides examples of:

The Boss during the final battle of Metal Gear Solid 3 when she opens her sneaking suit to reveal her snake-shaped C-section scar.

Naomi Hunter in Metal Gear Solid 4, where she leaves her labcoat unbuttoned and is obviously wearing no bra. Her lack of a bra is even a point that gets brought up in gameplay in one level; after being "rescued" by PMC soldiers and Haven Troopers, you're forced to track Naomi. The Haven Troopers use a variety of tricks to try and catch you including a voice recording and a pink bra left on the trail. According to the Integral Podcast, the designers wanted to have leave various pieces of female clothing throughout the trails, and a naked, unconscious female soldier near the end of the level. It also comes up as an Easter Egg. As part of the Rule of Funny/Rule of Drama schtick where certain cutscenes will affect Old Snake's psyche bar, Naomi runs some tests on Snake and estimates his accelerated ageing gives him less than a year, causing his psyche to plummet. When she stoops to his level to comfort him, however, players can enter first-person without warning and look down said obscene cleavage and restore psyche to full.

Action-Based Mission: At least Once per Episode, though it varies per entry. Most boss fights meet this description, and each game typically includes a number of fast-paced action setpieces to contrast with the slower-paced stealth gameplay:

There's often a high-tempo Rail Shooter sequence where Snake covers while a supporting character drives. Examples include: end of MGS, end of MGS3, end of Second Sun and middle of Third Sun in MGS4.

There's often an outmatched fight against an enormous vehicle. Examples include: Tank and Hind D in MGS, Harrier Jet in MGS2, all the vehicles and AIs in Peace Walker.

There'll probably be a forced alert sequence with difficult mooks, which often bring means of Respawning Enemies, unique Elite Mooks, or Super Powered Mook.note It's common for the standard mooks in sequences to have a similar health bar and/or mercy invincibility like the player, meaning they take a good few hits before death. Examples include: the prison, first tower stairs, second tower elevator and underground elevator in MGS; the post-core alert in MGS2; the optional Ocelot squad battle in MGS3; the FROG sequences in MGS4; and the Skull sequences in MGSV.

There's always straight-up battles against the Quirky Miniboss Squad. The only exceptions are Decoy Octopus in MGS (already dead), Fortune in MGS2 (can only be evaded), The End in MGS3 (tactical sniper battle or entirely skippable), and the entirety of Peace Walker and MGSV (no squad, just a Big Bad or two).

Finally, there's always a battle against the newest giant mech for entry: Metal Gear Rex in MGS, the Metal Gear Rays in MGS2, The Shagohod in MGS3, the last Ray while piloting Rex in MGS4, Peace Walker then later Metal Gear ZEKE in Peace Walker, and Sahelanthropus in MGSV.

Solid Snake and Meryl Silverburgh in Metal Gear Solid. Also, Snake and Otacon in the final car chase if you let Meryl die.

Snake and Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2.

Naked Snake and EVA in Metal Gear Solid 3.

Meryl and Johnny in Metal Gear Solid 4.

Venom Snake and Quiet in Metal Gear Solid V.

Action Girl: The Boss, Meryl, EVA, Olga Gurlukovich, Fortune, Sniper Wolf, the Beauty and the Beast Unit, the FROGS, Quiet, and various random female soldiers in Diamond Dogs and the Skulls.

Air-Vent Passageway: Handy to escape guards. At least half-invented this, at least in the world of video game publishing.

All Up to You: In most of the games, the radio contact who usually supplies info in regards to how to defeat various bosses is, for various reasons, unable to help Snake out in defeating the final boss. The only notable exceptions to this rule are Metal Gear Solid 3 where everyone in Snake's control team is cheering him on in beating The Boss, and Portable Ops, where Roy Campbell supplies some hints on how to beat Gene.

Many of the characters' backstories are only revealed in supplemental materials or in optional radio/Codec conversions within the games. The most notable is the true identity of The Boss and The Sorrow's son, who is only revealed if you trigger a radio call between Snake and EVA in Metal Gear Solid 3. It's Ocelot.

The Metal Gear Solid 4 Database, in addition to compiling every piece of Metal Gear lore up to Metal Gear Solid 4, features an extensive backstory for Raiden of what happened to him between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4 that is not even mentioned in the game itself.

Ghost Babel is an alternate sequel to the original Metal Gear; the first Acid game follows a different story (though Snake is still a legendary soldier) and the second goes further. In the case of Ghost Babel, it contains some hidden foreshadowing concerning the plot of Metal Gear Solid 2.

Snake's Revenge was also relegated to an alternate continuity after Metal Gear 2 was made, although it was originally intended to be a true sequel.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance included "Snake Tales", a series of five missions that featured Snake going through stages from Sons of Liberty, but with different plot point (there's no mention of the Patriots, and Snake's backstory is subject to changes). "A Wrongdoing" features Snake trying to save the President from Fatman, which turns out to be a plot by a third party. "Big Shell Evil" features Snake saving Emma Emmerich from Russian drug traffickers, while another third party is planning another plot. "Confidential Legacy" features Snake facing off against Sergei Gurlukovich and Meryl aboard the Tanker, and serves as a direct sequel to the first game. "Dead Man's Whisper" features Iroquois Pliskin helping Commander Dolph apprehend Vamp, with another conspiracy transpiring in the background. "External Gazer", the fifth and final tale, involves an alternate-universe Solidus planning on wrecking the multiverse by having Solid Snake destroy a fifty foot tall guard with death ray eyes.

This also happens in the games set in the future from their release, thanks to real life catching up and surpassing them. As above, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake has the Soviet Union lasting at least into the final week of 1999, when the real Union dissolved a year after the game's 1990 release. There's also a reveal near the end of Metal Gear Solid that the "Gulf War syndrome" experienced by numerous soldiers returning from the first war in the Persian Gulf (generally attributed in reality to exposure to things like depleted uranium in weapons and tank armor) being the result of injecting those soldiers with "soldier genes" as an early attempt at creating something similar to the Genome Army that act as the basic mooks in the game.

Ancient Conspiracy: Subverted in Portable Ops and further in Metal Gear Solid 4. The actual conspiracy, the Patriots, were formed fairly recently, in the 1970s, and only use the "ancient" conspiracy, the Philosophers which was itself founded in the early 1900s as a disguise to hide behind. The only link between the two is that the Patriots were founded with the money that the Philosophers left behind when they split.

Anti-Villain: Zero. Even though he is behind creating the Patriots, his ultimate goal was good and he is far more caring and humane than the typical Knight Templar. However, this is extremely debatable given his "caring" solution led to a network of AI crashing the world into sterile, hopeless future dominated by proxy wars and iron-fisted information control. Overall, straight-up non-Anti Villains are more the exception than the rule in this series.

Anyone Can Die: A good number of main characters do. At the end of Metal Gear Solid 4, more than 80% of all characters are confirmed dead.

Also: "Neither enemy or friend", "I've still got a job to do", and "The world needs only one Boss/Snake/Big Boss".

Snake's usual response to people telling him smoking is dangerous; "So's war and I've done that all my life" tends to show up, making for a heartwarming moment when Snake gives up at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4, after he learns he doesn't have to fight anymore.

Both Snakes like to say "Kept you waiting, huh?" whenever they make their first appearance.

Artistic License – Biology: Most infamously in the original Metal Gear Solid, where it is revealed that Solid Snake and Liquid Snake are both clones of Big Boss. Yet somehow they have different genetic make-up. It is revealed in Metal Gear Solid 4 that the two were genetically manipulated by the Patriots for different purposes. Solidus is the only 100% identical clone of Big Boss.

Auto-Pilot Tutorial: Some of the games show the player how to play by automatically scrolling through the items and sometimes controlling the player character.

Awesome, but Impractical: The Metal Gear concept itself. Sure, it seems like the ultimate weapon, given that it can launch nukes essentially undetected from any terrain, but the idea seems to run on Rule of Cool. The games seem to acknowledge this, though. The firsttwo games have the legs of the titular Metals Gears as a serious weak point (the TX-55 is brought down with multiple C4 charges at its feet. Metal Gear D is destroyed by hurling frag grenades at the knee joints), a flaw that is uncorrected until the development of Metal Gear REX. Even the later Metal Gear RAY can be disabled by firing Stinger missiles at its knee joints. The Shagohod, while technically not a Metal Gear, also has a similar (but not quite as fatal) flaw with its augers, as well as needing three miles of runway to launch its nuke.

One of the more egregious examples occurs in Metal Gear Solid. Upon encountering Sniper Wolf, Snake is told to go find a sniper rifle, which is in a room fairly close to where the player started the game. Snake even lampshades it. The Twin Snakes alleviates this by placing a non-lethal one much closer to where the player actually needs it.

Badass Beard: Big Boss and The End. The young Roy Campbell has one in Portable Ops too.

Badass Grandpa: Several. There's Big Boss, Revolver Ocelot, and The End. Solid Snake becomes one in Metal Gear Solid 4, and EVA is a badass grandma in the same game as well. Snake's case is a Deconstructed Character Archetype, as Snake fighting in spite of his condition isn't solely treated as being heroic or inspiring. Rather, it's occasionally treated as being foolish and suicidal by the other characters at the minimum, and said characters aren't above patronizing and treating him like a burden.

Badass Longcoat: Ocelot. Liquid would count except he only has the coat on for maybe two scenes maximum.

Snake, at least when compared to the majority of his supernaturally-gifted or crazy-equipped foes. He does have enormous willpower and is Made of Iron, but he can't carry an M61 Vulcan autocannon and doesn't usually have kickass battle armor to help him.

Big Boss. Even more so seeing as he isn't a cloned super soldier.

Johnny, of all people, qualifies. He's patently useless in the majority of appearances, but his actions at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4 cement his status (considering he was just a normal completely unmodified human soldier).

The Bad Guy Wins: Most of the Metal Gear Solid games (barring Metal Gear Solid 4) has the main characters actually unwittingly allowing the bad guys from behind the scenes to succeed in their overall evil plan, usually revealed in The Stinger. Metal Gear Solid 2 and, to a certain extent, Peace Walker are notable exceptions to the whole Stinger route, where it is made pretty clear that the behind the scenes villains won even before we get to The Stinger. It helps that the bulk of the series is essentially one big Enemy Civil War, with the Patriots as an elusive Greater-Scope Villain. The Big Bads of all of the main series Solid Snake games (BigBoss, Liquid Snake, Solidus Snake and Ocelot) all turn out to be rebelling against the Patriots for personal gain, so stopping them invariably just helps the Patriots maintain their stranglehold on the world.

Banana Republic: Outer Heaven and Zanzibar Land in the original MSX2 games. Oddly enough, the Metal Gear Solid games mostly avert this, with the exception of "Army's Heaven" in Portable Ops. The sidestory installments also have Gindra in Metal Gear: Ghost Babel and the Moloni Republic in Metal Gear Acid.

Beat Them at Their Own Game: Sniper Wolf and then Crying Wolf. The matching second names are not a coincidence, right down to a similar location for the boss fight, both in a snowfield and Communications Tower on Shadow Moses Island. Although it's not impossible to take down Sniper Wolf with Nikita or Stinger missiles at the final confrontation.

The mentality which leads to the formation of the Patriots, and various incarnations of Outer Heaven. Regardless of their allegiances, they're all military. Their lives revolve around war, and nobody in Metal Gear goes unscathed.

The theme of indoctrination and war propaganda runs deep in Metal Gear. The Genome Soldiers from Shadow Moses are genetically predisposed to war, creating in months what once took Big Boss several years and an army of war orphans to build. Raiden's old unit is snidely referred to by Snake as "grunts of the digital age," conditioned using the Force XXI virtual reality programs and lacking any real talent or experience. MGS2 focused on memes instead of genes, so the S3 Plan was a method of trying to ensure that people who support the Patriots could be generated at will and, theoretically, at a mass level. The Paradise Lost Army is, or course, yet another example.

Even in MGS3, Big Boss' support staff had that tiny bit of psychosis in them: Para-Medic talks enthusiastically about genes and cloning, Sigint's kinda obsessed with his projects, like the mask that could blink and the bioelectric battery; Zero loves his James Bond movies, but seemed to have had a particular fascination not just with the gadgets, but also the warmongering Bond villains, like Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

One of those little moments occurs in Peace Walker when Big Boss talks to Paz about the great stone spheres of Costa Rica. He instantly thinks of shooting them in a fire fight. Because, to Paz's horror, he just doesn't get or understand the value of anything that can't be used for war.

Biblical Motifs: All over the place. Big Boss' efforts to establish Outer Heaven, an Eden-like paradise for soldiers, play a major role in the mythos; appropriately enough, his utopia is brought down by a secret agent called "Snake". And Metal Gear Solid 3 has Snake working alongside two CIA agents code-named "ADAM" and "EVA", and seducing both of them. And in Metal Gear Solid 4, Ocelot even crushes an apple in one poignant scene.

The only Solid game that doesn't really count is probably the original Metal Gear Solid. Even then, the non-canon ending where Meryl dies is very bittersweet and wasn't revealed as non-canon until ten years later in Real Life, when Metal Gear Solid 4 was released.

Any Cyborg Ninja worthy of the name in Metal Gear can deflect more than they weigh. Grey Fox held back Rex from crushing Snake easily and Raiden could also block hits from a massive mech easily. Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance gave Raiden a block function that is pivotal to success, but he can still take damage while blocking if his opponent is awesome or big enough.

If taken chronologically (and canonically, in light of Metal Gear Rising), the series begins and ends with Big Boss smoking a cigar.

The entire franchise begins and ends with a charcter being briefed on Solid Snake's mission to Outer Heaven.

Boring, but Practical: All games post-MGS2 have a tranquilizer gun than can attach a suppressor. It's usually one of the first weapons you get. It will likely see more use than all of your rocket launchers, shotguns, railguns, grenade launchers, and automatic weapons combined, especially in gameswhererecruiting enemy soldiers is a major gameplay element.

Boss Battle: The series is famous for, among other reasons, its excellent boss battles:

In Metal Gear, Big Boss orders Snake to turn off the MSX2 or NES console.

In Metal Gear Solid, Psycho Mantis will scan your PlayStation or GameCube memory card for existing save files from other Konami games. He also does a harmless attack called "Hideo" which blacks out the screen and displays the aforementioned words to fool the player into checking their tv.

In Metal Gear Solid, revolver Ocelot warns Snake that if he detects a controller with rapid-fire capability, he'll automatically disqualify him and kill Meryl.

In Metal Gear Solid 3, Naked Snake says he can't smell in a CODEC conversation with The Boss. She replies that he'll just have to use his instincts as a gamer (something Miller also told Solid Snake in Metal Gear 2). Obviously, the player can't use their sense of smell to aid in their awareness of their surroundings.

Portable Ops has Snake mention to Sigint that the equipment has been completely changed to be lighter and more compact, and he can now take the equipment outside—being the first canon game in the series on a handheld system.

Pretty mild for most characters but up the ying-yang for the Snake "family." Although Western in origin, and in spite of the fact that both Otacon (who's surname is Jewish-German) and Mei Ling look much more Asian than any of the Snakes, the characters are told again and again how Asian they are. Says Vulcan Raven in Metal Gear Solid: "The blood of the East runs in your veins" and he then goes on to describe (how he knows this we have no idea) that Snake's ancestors were from Japan and before that the Mongolian plains. As it turns out, Snake and his brother Liquid were cloned using a donor egg from a Japanese woman (so their mitochondrial DNA is East Asian).

Otacon himself is a pretty good example as, while (as far can be told) he's entirely European in origin, he is an emphatic Japanophile. Likewise, Raiden, while not a Japanophile, seems like he walked straight out of one of Otacon's Japanese animes.

Johnny, who gets knocked out a lot and keeps getting bad diarrhea problems, and is the least competent of Rat Patrol Team 01... up until he gets some badass points and steals Meryl from our lovable, crotchety old clone.

Raiden has it pretty rough as well. In Metal Gear Solid 2 he is nagged by his girlfriend, is urinated on, he gets beaten up and used as bait for certain people, it is revealed that his parents were murdered by Solidus, and that's just his first appearance. In Metal Gear Solid 3 he was parodied by Volgin's gay lover Raikov, a usable face mask that Major Zero and Sokolov both apparently dislike, and Metal Gear Raiden: Snake Eraser where he travels back in time to kill Big Boss so that he could become the main character of the series. To say he failed miserably there would be a understatement. In between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4, he is told by Rose that she suffered a miscarriage (don't worry she was lying) after which he is tortured by the Patriots and used as a guinea pig for their experiments, his head is severed from his body at the jaw and transplanted to an entirely synthetic body, which is later upgraded to the exoskeleton we see him wearing in Metal Gear Solid 4.

But Thou Must!: While it's understandable given certain events need to occur, there's a few instances in the series where the game is just plain unfair with forcing you into situations, often triggering a non-standard alert and rending your stealth camo useless.

MGS infamously has the first communications tower, wherein players must pass through a door with crisscrossing sensors, a camera trap through the other side, and a screwy camera angle to encourage you to fall for it the first time you reach it. Naturally, this means an endless hoard of mooks spawns and you have to sprint all the way up four dozen flights of stairs spamming stun grenades or blindly firing your FAMAS.

MGS2 has the core alert after finding Ames. You've got enemies on high alert actively patrolling the core in increased numbers, but now your guard disguise doesn't work and they're not going away until you're caught or you escape. Expect to get frustrated.

In the original Metal Gear, Big Boss deploys Snake to Outer Heaven with the expectation that he will be captured and put away for a while, just like Gray Fox. When this fails, Big Boss comes out of hiding to kill Snake for interfering.

In Metal Gear Solid, the Pentagon turns Snake into a carrier for FOXDIE, an intelligent pathogen which targets members of FOXHOUND, as well as Kenneth Baker, the only man on the island who can implicate the Secretary of Defense Jim Houseman in the ArmsTech graft scandal. When the plan goes belly up, Houseman tries to nuke the island with bunker busters to remove all of the evidence anyway.

Metal Gear Solid 2 shares more in common with Portal than just the trope: in the prologue, Snake is framed for an eco-terrorist attack, spilling crude oil in the Hudson River.note The tanker contained no oil at all since the holds were emptied to make room for Metal Gear RAY. A duplicate tanker was sunk in the same location to pollute the river. This forms the pretext for the construction of an offshore "cleanup facility" which is actually a copy of Shadow Moses' nuclear disposal facility. Years later, Raiden, under the guidance of an AI masquerading as Colonel Campbell and his girlfriend, Rosemary, is sent to reenact the Shadow Moses Incident so the Patriots can gather data from it for their S3 Plan.

In Metal Gear Solid 3, Snake is betrayed twice: once when The Boss dupes FOX into handing Sokolov over to the Russians, and again when Snake is coerced into executing her for treason. In reality, The Boss was working undercover for the American government to siphon billions of dollars from their rivals, and wound up taking the fall for the CIA after Colonel Volgin fired an American nuke at Sokolov's research facility.

Canon Discontinuity: Snake's Revenge, a sequel to the NES version of the first Metal Gear which Konami produced for the international market without Kojima's involvement. It was technically the first Metal Gear sequel, as it actually inspired Kojima to make Metal Gear 2 in the first place.

Central Theme: One of the most notable things about the franchise is that every entry has its own theme; each unique, but also inherently tied to the others. While this allows each game to have a unique atmosphere, it also allows the story to have individual themes pertaining to each game, and explore them thoroughly.

Metal Gear Solid: GENE (how a persons genetic history, biology, and more affect them not just in physical makeup, but also in their reputations, expectancy, their own legacy, and whether or not it's genes or the environment that make the person)

Metal Gear Solid 2: MEME (how society at large is changed by information and control, how humans can be easily controlled through things they want to hear, and how information and ideas spread through social interaction)

Metal Gear Solid 3: SCENE (how a persons personality, physical makeup, likes and dislikes, and more can be changed by the environment they're put in, and how far people can go from where they started)

Metal Gear Solid 4: SENSE (how a person views the world, how others interpret that persons view of the world, and what happens when that person dies and their views and wants continue to influence others)

Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker: PEACE (the idea of perfect peace in the world, how far some will go to achieve it, if peace is possible at all, and, if it is, how long it can last before new conflict arises)

Metal Gear Solid V: RACE (how a persons drive to get revenge on others can affect the world around them, the constant competition between others and how it affects the world at large, and how language affects a persons mental growth and development)

Char Clone: Gray Fox in the remastered Metal Gear 2, Ocelot in Snake Eater and Liquid in the original Solid.

Character Outlives Actor: Koji Totani, the Japanese voice actor of villain Revolver Ocelot, died during the production of Metal Gear Solid 4. As a result, the role was recast to Banjo Ginga (Liquid Snake's Japanese voice), with Liquid Snake's persona having (apparently) taken complete control of Ocelot's mind as a convenient excuse for the recast. This wasn't much of an issue in the English version, since Ocelot's English voice actor Pat Zimmerman was still alive and reprised the role anyway.

The first we hear about Sunny is while she's still a developing embryo in Olga's womb early in Metal Gear Solid 2. She becomes a recurring character in Metal Gear Solid 4, and at the end, plays a big part in defeating the Patriots.

Johnny Sasaki was just a guard who had his clothes stolen and caught a cold in the original Solid, but still warranted a full name in the credits. Come Metal Gear Solid 4, and he was one of the major players who Took a Level in Badass.

Code Name: Every special forces group in the Metal Gear universe seems to have some sort of codename system. Most notably, the FOX unit (and later FOX HOUND) uses animal-themed names.

Cold War: The setting of the Naked Snake games (MGS3, MPO, Peace Walker, and V).

Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Meta-example. The packaging art for each MGS game (at least in Japan) have a main color each. This is further reflected in tie-in products such as the Acid series and Social Ops.

MGS = rednote Starting from the Integral edition, since the original release only had a plain black logo.

Companion Cube: The cardboard box. Both Solid and Naked Snake apparently have some sort of sexual fetish with it, and Naked Snake believes that not only is his being in the box his destiny, but it is also the true key to happiness. The former finds it relaxing to sit in the box - or, y'know, barrel. Solid Snake doesn't just find the box relaxing, to him, it's the most important thing he has on him. He even lectures Raiden about it, giving the famous "Take care of your cardboard box, and it'll take care of you" comment.

"I'm not exaggerating when I say the success of your mission hinges on how you use that cardboard box."

Contemplate Our Navels: The series has to be a Lifetime achievement Award contender, especially the Metal Gear Solid games. Characters spend lots of time waxing poetic about the harshness of war, the dangers of genetic engineering, the military-industrial complex, their tragic childhoods, etc.

Continuing Is Painful: Variation: You can continue as much as you want without any harm except your rank at the end suffer. On the other hand, with the exception of a few bosses that your support team gives you more specific advice for (and on two cases, both tell you the secret that makes the fight possible) on future attempts, there is no reason to not just select "exit" to go the main menu and then load instead as long as you remember to save at the start of each area (where "continue" will return you to).

Copy Protection: Both, the MSX2 version of Metal Gear 2 and the original MGS, had a certain character's contact number written on the back of the retail packaging. In the latter's case, this became problematic to players who bought the game secondhand without the original CD case or were merely renting it.

Cut Scene: Let's just say there are two types of people in the Metal Gear fandom: those who hate Metal Gear because of the cutscenes, and people who don't.

It is frequently said by fans that Metal Gear's an interactive story, rather than a game, not that it's a bad thing.

Cutscene Incompetence: Very frequent. It's pretty common for the player to be doing great, only for a certain cutscene to hit and have the protagonist screw up and/or cause a non-standard alert for Rule of Drama.

MGS3 has the notorious bike sequence, wherein Snake and EVA both stop watching the road for several seconds (at the same time too) to examine the bike closely. Unsurprisingly, by checking the bike the exact way a pair of idiots would, they end up crashing which forces the player into the widely disliked Escort Mission sequence.

MGS4 has a few parts wherein Old Snake has his symptoms flare up, causing much incompitence. The worst offender is probably the end of First Sun, wherein Liquid Ocelot gets away simply because Snake is suddenly unable to take the shot he's managed fine for the past hour of gameplay.

Cleverly invoked in the cut epilogue of MGSV. A blast causes trauma to Snake's shrapnel wound, triggering a mild seizure and impacting his ability to differentiate between red and white. With Snake panicking and surrounded, the game helps the player rapidly gun down the hazmat mooks, only for the last one to shriek like a child; returning color reveals that the seizure made Eli's red hazmat suit look like the XOF white suits, effeectively tricking the player into triggering this trope.

Cyber Cyclops: The Ninja in MGS1 and Metal Gear Ray are both cyclopes.

Only the mass production models of Metal Gear RAY are Cyclopes. The prototype has two optical sensors.

Also, although Gray Fox's mask affects the appearance of a cyclops, if you look closely the eye holes are actually two slits immediately next to the giant red scanner. However, the aesthetic remains similar.

However, and this is more noticeable in Twin Snakes but still present in the original, if you look at Gray Fox's face when he's unmasked you'll note that he only has one eye left, as the result of his near-death experience.

Dark-Skinned Blond: Fortune, Drebin and Scott Dolph. Also, technically Liquid, but his dark skin and blond hair were the result of bleaching during his time in the Iraqi prison camp, and he's not black in any percentage, like the other three examples.

Death Seeker: Metal Gear Solid had Gray Fox, who was looking for one last battle with Solid Snake. MGS2 introduced us to Fortune, whose father died in the tanker incident, followed by her husband's death and a miscarriage as a result of all the stress. She cannot be hit by bullets due to a top secret electromagnetic weapon that she unknowingly carries. Vamp doesn't really start playing this role until MGS4, and injects himself with nanomachine suppressants in order to cancel out his healing factor and finish himself once and for all. Snake himself arguably counts in MGS4, since his reasons for living are rapidly disappearing. He decides to see the world with Otacon during his last few months, however.

The games, and particularly the MGS series, follow the beats of a typical Hollywood blockbuster: a VIP is taken hostage (in MGS1 and MGS2, the victims are nabbed during an unveiling of their pet development project, and the government forces Snake to comply with the rescue — both premises taken from Die Hard and Escape From New York); a fat ransom is demanded; the terrorists fan out and get picked off one-by-one by a solitary intruder.

MGS2 follows the same playbook, though roughly half the game is spent tailing behind Snake and being deliberately kept in the dark about his movements, much like the terrorists themselves. You're not playing as Bruce, or even Sam Jackson. (That's Stillman.) You're more like Justin Long. Alternatively, Raiden starts the mission as a deep cover enemy agent, unknowingly helping the Patriots to further their goals. As the mission progresses, Raiden starts to realize why Snake and his allies hold Raiden at arm's length, and the game is primarily about him earning the right to be a driving force in the storyline.

Dysfunction Junction: The games go to lengths to point out just how incredibly screwed up almost every single character is, and the tragic consequences of such.

Played straight with FOXHOUND, Dead Cell, the Cobras and the B&B Corp. In each case, they are specifically described as some of the most dangerous people on planet Earth.

Elite Mooks: The Hi-Tech Soldiers, Arsenal Tengu in MGS2, the Rocket-men and FROG units in MGS4, the Skulls Unit in MGSV.

Peace Walker has Scouts, who can counter CQC with fibre wire, and armoured escorts, who take much more damage and carry heavier weaponry in later boss battles.

Enemy Chatter: Only during Alert, Evasion, and Caution phases. However, there is some chatter to be found in most games, if you look hard enough.

Enemy-Detecting Radar: Present in all of the main MGS games, in one form or another. The first two had the "Soliton Radar" which showed you the position and facing of enemies on a nearby radar minimap. Some people complained—justifiably—that the radar actually made things a little too easy. For MGS3, the prequel, they had a number of lower-tech solutions that all ran off of battery power: a motion sensor that would not detect stationary enemies, a "sound ping" radar that could give away your position to someone nearby, and an "AP sensor" that made the controller vibrate when enemies were near. MGS4 gave players the "Threat Ring" which showed the relative locations of enemies surrounding Snake, but only when he held still and knelt on the ground, and also a sound-detecting radar in the form of the Solid Eye—loud explosions, gunfire and other turmoil would make it not work as well, but it provided a nice balance between the previous incarnations. MGS5 uses the "Marking" system, which tags people and important items (such as vehicles, fixed guns or supplies for your base) while looking at them using binoculars or aiming with a gun ; tagged items and people appear as pictograms on your map and on your screen (if you are close enough) until they are killed/destroyed or leave the map.

Equal-Opportunity Evil: The ranks of the various Quirky Miniboss Squads tend to be quite diverse. And then there're the Patriots.

Escort Mission: Raiden and Emma; Big Boss and EVA; Old Snake and Drebin's Stryker; Old Snake and the Van.

Everything Fades: Averted - except for the first MGS, dead bodies don't go and need to be hidden.

However, enemies killed in alert mode or action sequences will disappear (flicker out more like it), and occasionally in normal status if one waits long enough.

As a possible reference to this, Liquid Ocelot's elite FROG units immolate themselves once they're dead, and if Snake touches the bodies, they crumble to dust.

Played straight in Revengeance, since bodies cut down by Raiden exploded right after, of if cut down for to much time in Blade Mode or the HF Wooden Sword, simply faded (this happens due to the possible crash that lots of scattered enemies pieces would cause).

Evil Brit: Two of the most influential villains in the entire series are British: Zero, founder of the Patriots, and Liquid Snake, one of the only men in the world who can face Solid Snake in equal combat. Ironically enough, in the Japanese version they're voiced by the same actor, Banjo Ginga.

Subverted with Strangelove, who is more like an anti-heroic albino, Emma (who was the daughter of a British woman), and possibly Otacon, as the in-game novel In The Darkness Of Shadow Moses: The Unofficial Truth implies that Otacon has some British ancestry. Peace Walker ends with Strangelove and Huey coming to an 'understanding', and MGSV canonises her as Otacon's mother.

Evil Is Dumb: Johnny Sasaki and, arguably, Fortune, with the latter thinking she was born lucky.

Averted in Peace Walker, where not only does time not stop during a Codec call, but it's also actively encouraged that you don't attempt to call when near enemies. MGS4 also has some Codec calls in real time, where the person calling is just telling you where to go next or commenting on something nearby.

Subverted in Revengeance. The traditional codec screen returns, but is only used for optional conversations between Raiden and his support team. All story-related codec calls are done through an Expository Gameplay Limitation so as to hide a loading screen, and occasionally as Dialog During Gameplay.

Expy: Snake shares many characteristics with Snake Plissken from Escape from New York, while Colonel Campbell is Colonel Trautman from Rambo. Given that Kojima is an avowed movie fan, this is no surprise.

Raiden is an expy of Solid Snake, and probably Jack from Titanic (1997).

Raikov in turn is an expy of Raiden.

Eyepatch of Power: Subverted slightly in that Big Boss' eyepatch really is an eyepatch, while Old Snake's Solid Eye simply provides optical enhancements... as well as 'radar,' of sorts. Well, then there's also Solidus.

Raiden Custom Body's eyepatch acts as a cybernetic eye, since Doktor couldn't get a replacement after he lost his eye to Sam (in fact, the eyepatch he uses has all the benefits of a fully operational artificial compound eye, and all the coolness of an eyepatch).

Fakeout Escape: One of the ways Snake can escape jail cells he ends up in (in Metal Gear Solid) is by simply hiding under the bed while the guard is gone.

Final Speech: Every single character death includes one of these. No exceptions, bar the bosses in the first Metal Gear game.

First Person Snapshooter: Each Metal Gear Solid features a digital camera that allows the player to take screenshots of the game and save them to the memory card.

Fisticuffs Boss: Frequent. There's Solid Snake vs Liquid (ending Metal Gear fistfight in MGS1), Naked Snake vs The Boss (ending CQC fight in MGS3), and Solid Snake vs Liquid Ocelot (final boss in MGS4). The only exception in the first four games is MGS2, where the final boss fight with Solidus a sword fight.

The Big Bad: Skull Face (An elusive, powerful, and horrifically scarred man who wants to achieve his personal revenge and gain closure, as well as stop cultural imperialism, but commits truly heinous acts while in pursuit of his goals).

The Dragon: Tretij Rebenok (A psychic child used by Skull Face to do most of the hard work, but oddly for a Dragon, he doesn't do any physical fighting, and becomes a sort-of Starscream near the end of the game.)

The Evil Genius: Huey Emmerich (a Gadgeteer Genius forced to work for Skull Face to design a new Metal Gear, and decides to ask for Big Boss to save him purely to save his own skin as he is worried that Skull Face will kill him once the Metal Gear is complete).

The Brute: The Man On Fire, a fire demon-like being who is the most physically powerful character in the series, seems to have bonded with Tretij Rebenok and specifically targets Big Boss.

Flawed Prototype: The eponymous Metal Gears, nuclear-armed walking tanks that never actually get into the production stage. RAY and the GEKKO are exceptions, but as the games are quick to remind us, they aren't actually Metal Gears.

In the fourth game a cybernetic variant occurs during Raiden's over the top battle with the Gekko mecha. One of the badass moves he pulls is to leap onto a Gekko's head and force it's M2 Browning HMG to cut down one of it's partner IFVs. Justified by his augmented robotic strength.

Forgotten Superweapon: REX was more or less abandoned at Shadow Moses. Justified since REX was developed illegally.

The games themselves are riddled with foreshadowing. Starting from the first Metal Gear Solid we have references to Snake not aging well and the mention of a few characters from Metal Gear Solid 2. MGS2 gave us the revelation that the Metal Gear technology was originally Russian. MPO brought in hints of who the Patriots really were.

Four Is Death: There are four games set in years ending in a 4, and every major character in the earliest of these games by series chronology is dead by the end of the latest—which is Metal Gear Solid 4. Furthermore, that game in particular kills off four such characters: Big Boss, Ocelot, EVA, and Major Zero. note While his appearance was ultimately cut, an elderly Johnny was supposed to make a cameo in the ending of MGS4 as a guest at the wedding of his grandson Johnny Sasaki to Meryl Silverburgh, which would make him the only named MGS3 character to explicitly survive the end of MGS4'', with Raikov and Sokolov's status unknown.

Future Badass: Raiden in MGS4, Null to Gray Fox. Additionally, Portable Ops can count - the remaining survivors of the San Hieronymo incident later become part of Big Boss's mercenaries.

All of Big Boss' children are skilled soldiers. Not surprising, since they're clones and were in fact raised specifically to be perfect soldiers.

Even more egregious is Otacon and his father, both genius robotics engineers with similar personalities, who wind up unwittingly creating walking nuclear death tanks and then actively work to stop their work from being used. Huey's relationship with Big Boss mirrors Otacon's with Solid Snake's as well. Until it's revealed that Huey was actually an asshole.

Gone Horribly Right: The Patriots started the Les Enfantes Terrible project because they wanted perfect soldiers like Big Boss. They succeeded, and ended up with three guys who do not enjoy getting dicked around at all.

Gratuitous French: The name of the project that spawned the Snake clones; Les Enfants Terribles (The Terrible Children).

There's also the first incarnation of Big Boss's Outer Heaven, Militares Sans Frontiers (a take off Medicines Sans Frontiers, which they had to throw a legal disclaimer saying the two weren't related.)

Mistral's polearm L'Etranger. Justified in the fact that she is a big Shout-Out to Albert Camus' novel The Stranger ("L'étranger" in French).

Graying Morality: Most of the games feature a de facto villain while playing with moral ambiguity as a thematic device. That is until MGS4 which is a full on Grey and Gray Morality story which also retcons the series conflict into one as well.

Cipher, led by Zero for Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, except not really for Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain as Skull Face was not operating under orders from Zero in Ground Zeroes, and sometime before The Phantom Pain, Zero realized his mistake in creating Cipher, and soon after, Skull Face attacked him with a parasite that slowly crippled his brain and turned him into a human vegetable while Skull Face took control of Cipher, except for the Patriot AI project, which was overseen by Donald Anderson/SIGINT, and would later become…

Groin Attack: In MGS2 and MGS3, shooting an enemy in the family jewels was a one hit kill. In MGS4, you can knock out a male enemy by crushing their balls. Performing it on a FROG-Trooper, however, turns it into a grope and a very angry FROG trooper.

Heal Thyself: Resting in hidden areas in MGS3 and MGS4 restores health, not to mention the fast-regenerating camouflage given to you by one of the bosses in MGS3. (In MGS4 there are at least two iPod songs that specifically increase Old Snake's recovery rate.)

In MGS2, when bleeding, Raiden can stop the bleeding if he stays still because of the fast acting nanomachines.

Heterosexual Life-Partners: Snake and Otacon. They're serious competitors with Mario and Luigi for the title of "Most Badass Bromance in Videogame History".

Honor Before Reason: Averted and commented on by everyone, especially Solid Snake, who mocks the idea.

Hopeless Boss Fight: In MGS4, Vamp would be unless you use the Syringe to end his nanomachine-enhanced regeneration.

In MGR:R, Senator Armstrong just punches and kicks you like a ball in the first and second fights, until you get Murasama HF Blade and kicks his butt.

Fortune in MGS2 is truly a hopeless fight; all you can do is dodge her shots until events force her to leave.

Hot Scientist: Naomi Hunter. Otacon also becomes significantly more attractive with each game, ironic as Snake becomes older and uglier with each game.

Human Weapon: The franchise has this as the main theme. The plots usually revolve around the protagonist and their direct opposition being manipulated by politicians, conspiracies, and other forces, and being treated as expendable tools with no goal or aspirations of their own.

Hyperspace Arsenal: Unabashedly. You can carry about fifty weapons in MGS4, but only five at a time that you can wield in your menu. You can also carry an oil drum.

Portable Ops and Peace Walker downplay this trope heavily. Portable Ops allows you to carry four items only, regardless of type. Peace Walker, on the other hand, will allow you to carry between one and three primary weapons, depending on which outfit you're wearing, and a couple of secondary weapons as well as a limited number of items.

Averted in The Phantom Pain. You can only carry one large primary weapon* Sniper rifle, machine gun, rocket launcher, or ballistic shield, one hip-holstered primary weapon* Assault rifle, shotgun, or grenade launcher, one small secondary weapon* Pistol or SMG, a bionic fist (Snake only), a knife, and a range of throwable/placeable weapons and items.

Tropes I to P

I Cannot Self-Terminate: Gray Fox has absolutely nothing to live for except one last battle with Solid Snake. Vamp's nanomachine-enhanced Healing Factor prevents him from committing suicide. Fortune cannot be hit with bullets, and any grenades thrown in her vicinity end up being duds due to the top secret electromagnetic weapon developed by the Patriots that she is unknowingly carrying, but she lost everything after the tanker incident so this is actually a curse. All three are looking for a Worthy Opponent to finish them off. The Boss was a special case, as the Philosophers ordered her to die at Naked Snake's hands for the sake of a cover-up. She couldn't commit suicide, and she couldn't tell Snake what was going on. The fact that nuclear war would likely result if she stayed alive was also a factor. Even Snake fits this during MGS4, as he cannot die until he completes his mission.

Identical Grandson: Big Boss and the three Snake brothers are meant to resemble each other (notably in the fact that Solid Snake is a dead-ringer to Naked Snake, the young Big Boss, while Solidus Snake resembles the elder Big Boss).

Ignorance Is Bliss: The Emmerich family are never told that they are working on a machine that is going to be used to destroy the world because they would not help. Thankfully they are incredibly gullible.

I Have Many Names: Many characters, especially those appearing in multiple different games, have several identities they are referred to as. These include:

Seriously, though...piloting REX in MGS4 proves why Otacon's design was the most badass weapon ever developed in a semi-realistic setting.

Instant Sedation: Subverted and played straight. Shooting a guard (with no vest or helmet) in the chest, butt, or head does this; but it'll take anywhere from thirty seconds to five minutes, depending on the difficulty level, to knock out a guard in any other zone.

Interface Screw: For realism (when sniping, if you don't take a relaxant medicine the character's hand shiver) or just messing with the player's mind (Fission Mailed, the Psycho Mantis battle).

Large Ham: Liquid Snake and his wacky arm gestures, Revolver Ocelot, and Death Seeker Fortune are guilty of this. And when Liquid's arm possesses Ocelot, the hamminess can barely be described.

Ocelot even calls Fortune out on this at the end of 2, before killing her "You were hamming it up as the tragic heroine, thanks to the script the Patriots wrote for you."

Justified in MGS with Liquid as the graphics in the 90's didn't exactly allow for subtlety of movement. Not to mention it's supposed to be a deconstruction/homage of classic 60's spy and horror movies, a fact which Paramedic effectively spells out in 3.

Laser Sight: Useful. Since you don't use iron sights in MGS2, it's the only way to aim; and in MGS4, you'll need it if you use third person a lot.

Late-Arrival Spoiler: Despite being prequels, both Peace Walker and MGSV end with timelines that spoil all of the previous games to a degree, with the kicker being that they're both on unique formats. Never played MGS4 because you skipped out on owning a PS3 for whatever reason? Hope you don't mind having many of its plot points spoiled for you.

Latex Perfection: Somewhat subverted; the mask's lips don't move, Snake's facial structure is roughly recognizable beneath the mask, and the FaceCamo used by Laughing Octopus and Snake is MUCH more advanced than current technology.

Legacy Character: Big Boss was the original Snake and Solid Snake inherited the codename from him. While Liquid and Solidus both have "Snake" in their full codenames as well, only Solid is referred as "Snake" by other characters.

The first one represented conversations on the radio by showing a portrait of each character in the conversation, with Mouth Flaps when they spoke. The most expressive they got were the occasional change in expression, such as Mei Ling sticking her tongue out at the player, or Otacon jamming his face up against the camera to warn Snake about stealthed assassins.

MGS2 upped it with facial models of the characters - however, the Mouth Flaps are really off, and the characters frequently used CODEC when they were standing right in front of each other (the in-universe reasoning being that CODEC calls are inaudible to eavesdroppers, but it's obviously just a time/memory-saving measure that allowed the developers to provide exposition between characters without having to render the environment surrounding them all the time).

MGS3 dealt with the first problem by representing the characters with still pictures, as it took place in the 1960s, when two-way video-phone devices would be nonexistent.

MGS4 avoided it entirely by showing full videos of the character Snake was speaking to, although Snake only has two main contacts in that game (Otacon and Rosemary).

Revengance plays with it, for some reason. The required calls are done in a Gears of War or Batman: Arkham Asylum style, with Raiden putting two fingers up to his ear and walking really slowly, although there's a floating full model portrait, and the optional ones have the same thing, but done in the classic style. However, the mouth flaps are still extremely, extremely off, even though it seems out of place in a modern game.

Long-Lived: Each of the numbered games since MGS2 has had at least one character whose age is in triple digits: Old Boy in MGS2, The End in MGS3, Major Zero in MGS4, and Code Talker in MGSV.

Lost in Translation: "La Li Lu Le Lo" are "missing" vowel sounds in Japanese; the point of the name is that it's not technically possible to write or say it in Hiragana (because there's no distinction between "L" and "R" and the string is usually "Ra Ri Ru Re Ro"), so the Patriots censor their name to something that can't be written down or spoken. This is never really gone into in the dub (since English doesn't do that), so it just seems to be meaningless babble.

Some could say that it worked out fine, while in English you can say "La Li Lu Le Lo", anyone who says that in the middle of a conversation for no reason seems silly and out of place. This makes it difficult to take their opinion seriously, thus getting the characters (and the viewer) to wonder about the legitimacy of their claims as well as the declaration of the existence of the patriots

McNinja: The various incarnations of the Cyborg Ninja, none of them Japanese. Revengeance even opens with Raiden quoting from the code of Samurai, whom he obviously esteems.

In Sons of Liberty, the Russian soldiers eventually trade in their camo for futuristic "Tengu" uniforms, complete with naruto sandals and blades.

Made of Iron: All the Snakes qualify to some extent, but Liquid takes the cake. He survives a helicopter crash, a large explosion, a high fall and several gunshot wounds before finally succumbing to the FOXDIE. Even then, he is able to possess Ocelot through his arm except he isn't possessing Ocelot, it's a trick.

Raiden, too, especially once he's a cyborg ninja. In fact, pretty much anyone in combat in this franchise.

Magic from Technology: Even though some abilities of characters seem downright magical, mostly they are given a scientific explanation. For example, Vamp's regeneration and Screaming Mantis' mind control both take advantage of nanotechnology. There are a few notable aversions in the series as well - the source of Psycho Mantis' or The Sorrows powers are never explored and they appear to be genuinely paranormal.

However, the series is infamous for its love of complexity. Don't expect any single explanation to cover a character. In the case of Vamp, while he used nanomachine regeneration, his other abilities are never given solid explanation, and at least one character turned out to have genuine powers separate from the technology that was assumed to provide them. Basically, don't assume that the wizard has been done in until you see the body. And even then...

The Man Behind the Man: Like you wouldn't believe, though the Patriots could be more accurately described as the computer behind the man.

Events have been playing out totally differently to player expectation. Typically the Player Character has actually been a pawn in the grand scheme of events, and they've actually been dancing to the villain's secret Gambit Roulette.

MGS2: Plissken is the real Solid Snake, Solidus Snake is the third Big Boss clone and Raiden's adoptive father, Colonel Campbell as a Patriot AI, the Cyborg Ninja is Olga Gurlukovich acting to save a loved one.

MGS3: The Boss is only pretending to be a turncoat to prevent WW3, and in the ending EVA turns out to really be a Chinese spy.

MGS4: Rat Patrol 01 is another set of unaware Patriot puppets, Drebin is still loyal to the Patriots, Cypher is Major Zero, Big Boss was never really dead and has woken up, Naomi is terminally ill and trying to fix things, The Patriots are revealed to be Major Zero's team in MGS3 plus EVA and Ocelot, the true villains are revealed as Patriot AIs gone haywire and plunging the world into a war economy, the list goes on.

Peace Walker: Mena is a Russian agent called Zadornov, The Boss is only an AI, the ending reveals The Boss truly did believe in fighting for peace (to Snake's dismay), the epilogue reveals Paz is Pacifica Ocean (an agent of Cypher).

MGSV: By the ending we have Venom Snake revealed as a doppelgänger for Big Boss, Skull Face is Big Boss' shadow (having acted as his uncredited support), and the additional tapes reveal Zero tried to make amends with Big Boss only to be made vegetative by Skull Face.

In Snake Eater, after Naked Snake is promoted to the rank of Big Boss, having killed his mentor, The Boss, he visits her grave, and salutes her one last time as a single tear roll down his cheek.

Fifty years later, Big Boss visits her grave one final time, and attempts to salute her before collapsing from exhaustion...as as he enjoys one final smoke with his son, one more tear rolls down his cheek, and he dies with a faint smile on his face.

Menu Time Lockout: Generally played straight. Subverted in only one instance so far: in MGS3, pausing for 10 minutes during the final battle with The Boss will result in the MiGs destroying the battlefield as she said they would if she wasn't defeated in that time.

Methuselah Syndrome: Four different characters are stated to have lived for over a century (The End, 1861?-1964; Code Talker, 1880?-????; Old Boy, 190?-2008 and Major Zero, 1909-2014).

Snake and Solidus (and Liquid, but he doesn't live long enough to decay) are an inversion, similar to the Replicants from Blade Runner. They're not engineered to last.

Mr. Exposition: Happens at the start of every game with the Colonel, Otacon, Major Zero, et cetera.

Multi National Team: The Quirky Miniboss Squad from each game tends to be this. The Cobra Unit was a group of American, Russian and possibly other nationalities who fought against the Nazis in World War II. Big Boss tends to recruit people regardless of nation or ideology, hence the diversity of his armies. FOXHOUND and Dead Cell, while (originally) ostensibly American special forces units, carry on this tradition with Brits, Kurds, Russians, Americans, Chinese and others. To boot :

Mysterious Informant: Used in Metal Gear 2, Metal Gear Solid, and MGS2. The reason it was repeated in the original MGS was because Metal Gear 2 was only released in Japan, and MGS1 followed more or less the same plot in a different setting. The second time this happened was for another reason.

Mythology Gag: The series has a few recurring jokes and themes, most notably the cardboard box (which appears in every main game in the series).

Nanomachines: Everything supernatural that happens? It's caused by these buggers in one way or another (with the possible exceptions of The Sorrow, Psycho Mantis, and Vulcan Raven).

Lampshaded by Armstrong during his battle with the now memetic sentence : "Nanomachines, son !"

New Game+: You start out with goodies in games before MGS4. MGS4, you get all your weapons and earned gear, plus goodies.

Nintendo Hard: "Extreme" and "European Extreme" mode. The difficulty varies depending on the title, with Snake Eater on the low end, and Sons of Liberty on the "Holy-Shit-Twenty-Metal-Gears-Are-You-Serious" end.

No Fourth Wall: One of the trademarks of the series. Characters explicitly describe the game's controls with a straight face; the Copy Protection involves a character asking you to look at the back of the game package; one of your Voices With An Internet Connection provides constant real-world advice on how to play your video game properly and healthily; a Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique scene involves the resident Magnificent Bastard warning you not to try to use autofire to beat the Mini-Game; and everything involving Psycho Mantis, who used your save game content to "read your mind," the rumble feature on your controller to move it with "telekinesis," had a special move that caused your screen to turn black, and could only be defeated by unplugging your controller and plugging it into the second port (or by already having a second controller in the second port, and picking it up). And that's only what the first game does; the second, which explicitly aims to break the fourth wall, was worse.

It got to the point of Lampshade Hanging: during Act 4 of MGS4, Otacon calls Snake and tells him to put in disc 2. Then he remembers that, because the game is on a dual-layer Blu-ray disc, there is no disc 2. (Snake tells Otacon to stop fooling around, while players freak out due to the exact location of this conversation.) Then, when Psycho Mantis shows up again, he tries to pull the same tricks. However, he can't read your memory since the PS3 doesn't have a memory card, and he can only make the controller vibrate if the player is using the Dualshock 3. And again in the previous boss fight, where the Colonel recommends using the same tricks against a different psychic boss, only to have them all shot down. Oh, and in Metal Gear AC!D2, when General Wiseman explains bits of the COST and CARD system to Snake, "Agent" Dalton hears all of this and confusedly says, "That just went right over my head."

No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Volgin to Naked Snake in Snake Eater, and even worse, Ocelot to Solid Snake in Guns of the Patriots.

Non-Linear Sequel: Why this series has one of the messiest chronologies known to mannote Chronology: MGS3 (1964), Portable Ops (1970), Peace Walker (1974), Ground Zeroes (1975), The Phantom Pain (1984), Metal Gear (1995), Metal Gear 2 (1999), MGS (2005), MGS2 (2007-2009), MGS4 (2014), Revengeance (2018). Metal Gear Solid Mobile is a good example. It seems to clearly fit in to the main timeline between MGS and MGS2, but the game's ending apparently makes it Canon Discontinuity.)

No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: Averted. Almost every Metal Gear built is based on the plans of the previous Metal Gear. Then the plans to make one got on the black market and everyone had a Metal Gear.

Not So Different: Despite professing complete difference from the enemies they fight, Big Boss and Solid Snake are often pointed out to be exactly like the soldiers on the other side. This also extends to each other, while Solid Snake absolutely denies that he's anything like his father the two are very similar, to the point that they even profess similar ideals about being a soldier.

Soldiers and scientists have a lot in common in the Metal Gear series; Snake, Liquid, Solidus, Raiden, the Boss and Big Boss are used as Unwitting Pawns. Otacon, Dr. Madnar, Huey and Sokolov wind up being manipulated into creating horrific superweapons. It adds a bit of Fridge Brilliance to Solid Snake and Otacon's Odd Friendship. They've both been used as tools for long enough and have decided to fight back, much the same way that Big Boss, Liquid and Solidus have.

MGS3 actually kind of inverts it. When fighting The End, Para-Medic says that she has a bad feeling about saving. If you save and reload the game, The End sneaks up behind you and tranqs you in the head. However, if you save and wait a week before playing again, The End will have died of old age.

One Dose Fits All: Zig-zagged in 2, 3 and The Twin Snakes, due to Gameplay and Story Segregation. Both games feature a tranquilizer pistol, with which enemies can be dispatched non-lethally. Tranquilizer darts will be equally effective on any regular enemy regardless of size, provided they are not wearing full body armour, making this a straight example. In boss fights, however, it's played with. Bosses can also be defeated non-lethally, but rather than knocking them out with a single dart to the head, they instead have a "stamina" bar (much like their regular health meter) which depletes the more they get hit by tranquilizer darts. However, this stamina bar is based not on the enemy's size, physical fitness or constitution, but rather simply scales up linearly as part of the game's difficulty curve. So it's averted, but in the interests of gameplay rather than realism (could be considered an Acceptable Break from Reality, as the boss fights would be very anticlimactic if the bosses reacted to tranquillizer darts the same way the regular enemies do).

One Steve Limit: Strongly averted. The series has six characters whose names are variants of John - two Johns (one also called Jack), another Jack, two Johnnys and an Ivan, plus two more of the similarly-sounding Jonathan. Five of them appear in Metal Gear Solid 4, and each game in the series has at least one. The same series also includes two Davids, Jim and James, Natasha and Nastasha, two President Johnsons (the real-life Lyndon Johnson and the fictional James Johnson), and no less than six characters who have at some point gone by the codename Snake.

One-Winged Angel: This trope usually doesn't come into effect in the series, since it deals more or less with more realism compared to most games. That being said, there are a few points where it comes pretty close canonically. For instance, Volgin merging with the Shagohod's wiring during the final battle, or Peace Walker turning from bipedal into a quadruped. The only game to play it completely straight is the non-canon sequel to Metal Gear, Snake's Revenge, with Big Boss.

Optional Stealth: Metal Gearis a stealth-based game series— Rather, it's thestealth-based game series. The games have varying difficulty levels. If one chooses the easiest difficulty, then it's a valid option to plow through the game without really needing to use its stealth elements. However, selecting anything above "Normal" makes using stealth absolutely necessary, as guards will be vigilant and difficult to take down, and using stealth is far easier than trying to macho one's way through. The most extreme gameplay modes in the Metal Gear series actually force the player to restart from the beginning if they are so much as noticed by one guard.

Pacifist Run: You receive a lower score at the end if you kill everything. Also, in MGS3 and MGS4, you get good bonus items from the bosses if you tranquilize them into submission instead of kill them. In MGS3, The Sorrow, a sub-boss that can't be killed, tries to kill you with guilt, sending the ghosts of your fallen (but not tranquilized) enemies stumbling towards you. The other bosses show up regardless of their ultimate demise, since even if you sedate them, they still use bombs to self-destruct. In MGS4beating the Beast forms of the Beauty & the Beast Corps allows the player to acquire their statue (collect them and the FROG statue for the Solar Gun), and beating the Beauty forms allows the player to collect their FaceCamo. As before, some of the Emblems (ranks) require a certain amount of kills (less than or more than) to acquire; the Pigeon and Big Boss Emblems for example require no kills.

Paper-Thin Disguise: In MGS1, Liquid disguises himself as an ally on Snake's codec by putting on sunglasses and changing his accent. Note that he still has the same voice, one distinctive enough that many players became suspicious the moment he opened his mouth. On the other hand, its subverted when the re-releases of Metal Gear 2 as well as his appearance in Peace Walker show that he actually does look like a disguised Liquid, and in the case of the latter game, even sounds like Liquid in disguise.

And, of course, you can hide inside cardboard boxes, which are literally a paper-thin disguise. Soldiers aren't totally fooled by these, though, especially in later games, and especially if the box is out in the open and in their way.

There's also Solid Snake disguising as Iroquois Pliskin in MGS2, by changing his uniform and nothing else.

And EVA as Tatyana in MGS3, which had her wearing glasses and her hair differently. However, she was so much better at disguise than Snake in 2.

Parrot Exposition: David Hayter has joked in interviews that most of the dialogue he has to record consists of repeating the last couple words the other person said, and adding a question mark to it.

Ironically in MGS4, used by Old Snake to restore Psyche until his body builds up a tolerance (in both gameplay and a cutscene near the end of the playable part of the game), as well as to make Vamp mortal and to free himself and Meryl from Screaming Mantis' nanomachine control.

Post-End Game Content: You'll always get something the first time you complete the game, and some more rewards if you also fulfill certain objectives during it. New Game+ gives you access to it.

Powered Armor: The Cyborg Ninja in the first MGS was a partial case, being a cyborg and all. The ninja and Solidus in MGS2 on the other hand are textbook cases.

Potty Failure: A running (ew) theme in the Metal Gear Solid games is toilet humour; generally, at least one case of someone wetting themselves occurs per game. 4 upped the ante with a scene of a man soiling himself in the middle of a heated gun battle. Um... Thanks, Kojima.

For every game in the series, as soon as you can find a silencer for the pistol, it instantaneously becomes your best weapon. This is especially true when the series introduces first-person view, because you can line up headshots so easily. Combine this with the fact that every gun is wildly accurate, and you can easily have situations where you line up a headshot from across the loaded map to where you can barely see the enemy textures, and it will work.

Metal Gear Solid 3 not only skips the step of making you find the Silencers which make the pistol so effective (though you can run out and need to restock them), but when you get it, Naked Snake goes on an extended monologue about how awesome the pistol is, and if you call Sigint later, he'll go even more in depth.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots almost seems to lampshade this when they give you the Operator at the beginning of the game, which is already a good gun, (according to the in-game stats) but then you can acquire the similar except better Mk 23 (the SOCOM from the original) and the M1911A1 that Naked Snake used in the third game, each gun being better than the last.

In Metal Gear Solid, Naomi reveals that her adopted brother rescued her (and put her through medical school) after she was orphaned. Her brother was Grey Fox, Snake's old Friendly Enemy; she joined the team to get revenge on Snake for killing him.

In Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, Grey Fox reveals that he's defected to Big Boss's side because he was recruited to Foxhound by him as a child soldier (the later games which starred Big Boss would elaborate on this).

Redshirt Army: The SEALs sent in to deliver the Nuclear Football in MGS2 (to be fair, they're up against a vampire and an unkillable woman with a railgun), the US Army/Marine Corps task force in MGS4 (though they later fend off a horde of FROG units).

Retcon: A few aspects of the story have been changed occasionally, such as MGS4 ignoring that Dr. Clark was a man in MGS1 to allow the character to also be Para-Medic from MGS3).

Rule of Symbolism: In MSG3 (Naked) Snake is given the order to meet with his contacts Adam and Eva. Eva goes so far to ask him if he has come to seduce her.

Rather interesting, as (Naked) Snake manages to successfully seduce bothAdam and Eva. Without even trying or noticing, even.

In MSG4 an apple falls from (Old) Snake's pocket and rolls towards Eva, who picks it up. Later she hands the same apple to Adam (aka Ocelot), who crushes it and throws it away.

The intro to MGS2 (itself a sort of Nostalgia Level) with Otacon shouting, "...Snake..? Snake?! SNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE" whenever your net a game over, and later "E.E.? E.E.!? E.EEEEEEEEE-!!" if the player screws the pooch and gets Emma killed.

The series' use of it is inverted near the end of Guns of the Patriots when the Scarabs start piling on Snake: "OOOTACOOOOOOON!" Inverted both for Snake being the one to use it, and it being a genuinely tense and dramatic moment instead of meme-fuel.

Snake screamed Otacon's name again earlier in Guns of the Patriots when he got half of his face burned very badly.

This almost qualifies as a CMOA during the final duel when after Snake takes an absolutely brutal beating at the hands of Liquid Ocelot he turns the fight around by breaking his enemy's fingers. As Snake rises he screams his rival's name with a cry of rage and frustration, to be answered in kind as the camera spins. And they they really start beating the hell out of each other.

Save Token: You can save by using your codec/radio/etc to call a "data analyst" and have them save your game for you.

The stingers to Solids 1-3 all feature one after the respective Wham Line comes up. In the original after learning that Ocelot was working for the President, in Sons of Liberty after Snake learns the Patriots have been dead for a century, and in Snake Eater after Ocelot reveals he was "ADAM".

That said, because of the plethora of prequels developed on more advanced hardware than Metal Gear Solid 4, the adventures of Big Boss generally include more advanced challenges and tools than the events occurring decades later, in terms of gameplay at least. It's hard to believe that Metal Gear Rex is supposed to be more advanced than Peace Walker, Metal Gear Zeke, or Metal Gear Sahelanthropus, who were developed two or three decades earlier.

Sensor Suspense: You will be looking at the radar minimap quite often, and you will most definitely notice when one of the blip's vision cones turns yellow.

Metal Gear Solid 4 had Liquid Ocelot take his shirt off before his climactic duel with Snake.

Shout-Out: Vietnam War-era jungle setting of the game aside, Snake of Metal Gear Solid 3 is a shout-out to James Bond AND John Rambo. The former is paid tribute to in the music of the alert phases, whereas the latter happens when Snake roars Sylvester Stallone's trademark battle-cry when firing an M63 machine gun. Solid 'Old' Snake also roars like this when firing the M60E4 in Guns of the Patriots, signifying how much he has become like his father.

The Meryl ending continues the shout out fest, this time being one of several shoutouts to Kojima's earlier visual novel game Policenauts.note Meryl Silverburgh was a character in that game, albeit older and tougher. She worked in Beyond Coast Polices Vice unit along with a young officer named "Dave" Forrest. For bonus points, MGS!Meryl even wears the same orange vest that Policenauts!Dave wears.

Of course, Hideo Kojima has shoutouts to his own work as well, with Policenauts posters and Snake can actually use the Gun De Sol from Boktai as a bonus weapon, the Solar Gun, by acquiring the FROG statue and the B&B Corps statues, by defeating them (for the B&B Corps their Beast forms) all nonlethally.

Metal Gear Mk. 2 originally appeared in Kojima's Snatcher. Except that one was a reference to the original Metal Gear. A reference is even made to the "Metal Gear Menace" of the late 20th century.

The freight Elevator in MGS is a near exact duplicate of the one in AKIRA, and even leads down to a sub-zero area.

Solid Snake's name is a shoutout to Snake Plissken from Escape from New York. The film is one of Kojima's favourites, and was a large influence on the series (particularly notable is the theme of an uncaring government sacrificing heroes for minor or personal gain).

The MGS4 "Chair Race" trailer featured a battle between Snake and Raiden over a chair labeled "main character". Snake's gear and method of movement in the trailer is reminiscent of Sam Fisher.

Skippable Boss: MGS3's The End - using two methods! Either set the clock ahead so that he dies of old age, or snipe him when he appears in his wheelchair — albeit the latter will lead to the boss fight areas being instead patrolled by 20 enemy soldiers. In MGS4 there are no truly skippable bosses, but any damage to her Life or Psyche that Raging Raven takes during the motorcycle chase sequence will carry over to the 'true' boss fight, so go fire on her with whichever bar of hers you wish to damage later.

Also in 3, if you blow up the HIND at the ammo dump, you won't have to face it later when you're climbing the mountain. If you blow up ammo and/or food dumps, the soldiers you face later will run out of bullets quickly and/or be weakened and hungry (meaning tranqs and CQC will take them down faster and they'll eat anything they find, including poisonous food).

Spotting the Thread: The fact that the DARPA Chief refers to the terrorist act as a revolution is a major hint that he might not be who he claims to be. Yet no one picks up on this, despite the fact that they know for a fact a master of disguise is among the Fox Hound renegades.

And in MGS3, there are several blatantly obvious hints that EVA might not be who she says she is, in her very first scene. She fails to answer the code phrase, instead gunning down several mooks... with a .45 ACP copy of the Mauser C96, which was only made and used by one nation during the Cold War: China. She even uses the "Bandit Shooting" technique that was invented specifically to take advantage of that gun's tremendous recoil. She ends up being a Chinese triple agent tasked with tracking down the Philosopher's Legacy. Of course, Snake doesn't pick up on any of this, due to EVA's Absolute Cleavage. Neither do most players.

Spy Catsuit: Inverted - only the men get them. And look damn Fan Servicey in them, too. EVA comes close in her form-fitting motorcycle outfit with Absolute Cleavage, and the FROGs wear a combat version of this.

The Beauties get some very form fitting suits. When facing off against Raging Raven, after she sheds her suit and turns away, still quite insane, Snake stares at her butt. Please note that originally, it was intended to be averted.

Start of Darkness: Metal Gear Solid 3, Portable Ops, Peace Walker and Metal Gear Solid V detail the events behind Big Boss' transformation from a young, patriotic soldier into a war hero disillusioned with the modern world's treatment of soldiers.

MG1: Big Boss survived the explosion and is waiting for Solid Snake, eager to fight him again.

MG2: The cartridge believed to contain Dr. Marv's secret plans turns out to be a joke. When inserted into an MSX computer, it seems to do nothing, but Dr. Marv left his mark: the boot-up screen reads "VRAM: 01K", which is "Kio Marv" spelled backwards.

MGS1/Twin Snakes: Ocelot was working with the President... and President George Sears is a third Big Boss clone named Solidus Snake.

MGS2: Most of the Patriots (later revealed to be their predecessors, The Philosophers) have been dead for up to a hundred years, leaving Otacon's "contributor" to be one of the few living members.

MGS3: Ocelot is triple crossing America and the Soviet Union, and stole the real Philosopher's legacy with the CIA Director to revive the Philosophers.

Portable Ops: Ocelot has retrieved the Philosopher's Legacy, and agrees to use it to start "The Patriots" with an anonymous figure on the condition Big Boss is allowed in too.

MGS4: While the FOXDIE isn't going to become a non-discriminatory weapon, Snake's aging still means he hasn't long to live. Since he doesn't have the ability to pass on anything to the next generation, Otacon decides to spend the rest of Snake's life with him as a witness.

Peace Walker: The first has Snake accept the title of Big Boss after learning the truth about The Boss. The second has Big Boss deliver a speech wherein he defines MSF's beliefs, and christens their base "Outer Heaven."

Revengeance: World Marshall is overthrown, but more PMCs are still on the rise. Raiden declares he still has his own war to fight.

Stompy Mooks: Inverted. Walking too fast behind a guard makes him turn around and notice you, turning you into the Stompy Mook. Most mooks themselves walk about normally, so unless they're walking on something noisy, making a status report, or wearing headphones, you won't hear them walking until you get fairly close.

Story-to-Gameplay Ratio: To reiterate. There are a lot of cutscenes. MGS4 has about nine hours of 'em. Check the helpful chart on the trope entry for how the average Metal Gear game breaks down.

Big Boss's trademark is an Eyepatch of Power, which we see him receive in Metal Gear Solid 3 (when he attacks Ocelot to keep him from assassinating Tatyana and ends up getting his right eye blinded by muzzle flare in a freak accident). His loss of the eye doesn't happen at exactly the same time as the large traumatic event that sculpts his character (the death of The Boss), but does serve to distinguish the difference from a rather innocent and ordinary soldier to a single-minded, ambitious and traumatised one. This injury is then repeated with over the course of the series symbolising the difference in each character's outlook compared to Big Boss:

In Metal Gear Solid 2, Raiden accidentally injures Solidus's left eye, which he appears almost ecstatic about, in accordance with his general fixation on Big Boss. He immediately starts wearing an eyepatch on it and even suggests being grateful to Raiden for doing it to him. Of course, his injuries are actually a mirror-image of Big Boss's, signifying that he himself is just a reflection of Big Boss rather than an individual in his own right.

In Metal Gear Solid 4, Solid Snake begins wearing an electronic sensor over his eye that resembles Big Boss's eyepatch. Between that, his visible ageing and the fact that his muscle-suit resembles Big Boss's bulky build rather than his own more sinewy one, he resembles Big Boss a lot - more to screw with the audience than anything (going from a Big Boss who looked like Solid Snake in 3 to a Solid Snake who looked like Big Boss in 4). While saving Big Mama (the same person as Tatyana, just many years on) from a fire, the sensor explodes and damages Snake's face, with the result of inverting Big Boss's injury - a burned face but a functioning eye. This serves to indicate Solid Snake's defiance of his own fate - his face, the thing that ties him to Big Boss, has been mutilated; and his ties to Big Boss - he got the injuries rescuing the same person; but most importantly his ability to still "see" things Big Boss has become "blinded" to.

Raiden also has a missing eye in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. This is because his eye and his arm were mangled by Sam at the beginning of the game - throughout the game, Raiden gets bonuses for chopping off enemies' right arms, repeating the injury done on him. The eye injury is covered, instead of with an eyepatch, with a bandanna resembling the one worn by Solid Snake, signifying to whom his allegiance is.

Metal Gear Acid 2 significantly uses a copy of The Boss's caesarian scar on the back of the female character Lucy - particularly unusual as the Ac!d games happen in an entirely separate universe to the main games. However, it supports Lucy's character as being a horrible monstrosity of a matriarch, child and wife figure simultaneously (referencing the description of The Boss from Metal Gear Solid 3 - "she was like a mother to me, and my master." "And your lover?"). As well as, more directly, suggesting some of the horrible surgical mutilations she would have received from the Mad Scientist responsible for creating her.

Sympathy for the Devil: Most villains in the series can be sympathized with to a certain extent. The Patriot AIs, Volgin and Hot Coldman avert this.

Metal Gear Solid (1998) introduced the peek-around-the-corner cover mechanic, where Snake can crouch behind and press against low walls and peak around corners.

Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001) expanded on it, introducing a shoot-around-the-corner cover system, where Snake or Raiden can crouch behind or press against low walls and aim from behind them, to shoot from around the corner of a wall. This shoot-around-the-corner cover system has also been employed in later Stealth Games like the Splinter Cell series and Tactical Shooter games like Rainbow Six Vegas (2006).

FOXHOUND had a two-part codename: the first part comes from the boss' specialty/weapon, the second part comes from an animal.

The Cobra Unit base their names off the emotions they carry into battle. For reference, this is where The Boss' second codename, The Joy, comes from.

The Beauty and the Beast Unit combines the emotion of a Cobra with a FOXHOUND operative's animal.

The Peace Walker AI Weapons are based off different names of a butterfly's formation. In addition, Dr. Strangelove named the AIs after American presidents (the same names would be reused for the Patriot AIs.

Lastly, the Winds of Destruction are named after powerful winds from their respective home countries.

Title Drop: Solidus Snake's terrorist group in MGS2 are the Sons of Liberty, Snake's mission in MGS3 is codenamed Operation Snake Eater, and Ocelot calls his master plan in MGS4 the Guns of the Patriots. Metal Gear is first introduced this way in the first game. Also, Snake Eater, despite not having an actual Metal Gear, introduces the man behind the original concept.

Together in Death: Ironically enough, several "happy" endings are this trope. The Boss and The Sorrow are reunited at the end of Snake Eater, Big Boss is implied to have longed to die in order to be reunited with The Boss (A wish which, according to Kojima, is granted), and Venom Snake and Quiet are reunited after Venom is killed by Solid Snake in Outer Heaven.

Transplant: Very few people knew that Meryl Silverberg was originally from the Japan-only Policenauts, and a version of Metal Gear Mk. II from Snatcher appears in MGS4. However, they are very different verisons of those characters. Versions of Jonathan and Ed appear in MGS4 as well, and in Japanese are played by the same Policenauts actors, just like Meryl. Incidentally their actors happen to be Otacon and Psycho Mantis as well.

Trilogy Creep: In interviews around the release of MGS3, Kojima said that he viewed the three Metal Gear Solid games at that point as a loose trilogy. Naturally, even that informal designation didn't last for long.

20 Minutes into the Future: Barring the Big Boss sections (which obviously take place in the past), the series tends to take place 4-8 years after the game's release and with appropriately advanced technology.

Two Lines, No Waiting: Since MGS3, the games have been split into telling the stories of Solid Snake and Big Boss.

And as if that wasn't enough, the final battle with Ocelot is an arcade-style fighting game.

Unusable Enemy Equipment: Though MGS2 managed to partially subvert this by having one CODEC conversation that explained that the weapons had an ID system that recognized a specific person, it's odd though how they didn't explain this more directly.

Finally averted in MGS4 by Snake getting a "hack" into the system... as a result, weapon pickups are a notable part of gameplay, and in Screaming Mantis's case it's necessary to pick up her Mantis Doll to defeat her.

Also averted in V. While the weapons aren't permanently unlocked until researched, Snake can use any that his enemies drop. Or gun emplacements. Or tanks.

The Verse: The series frequently jumps between three protagonists; Solid Snakenote (Metal Gear 1 and 2; MGS, MGS4, plus the prologue of MGS2), Naked Snakenote (MGS3, MPO, PW and MGSV) or Raidennote (MGS2 and MGR).

Video Games and Fate: An underlying theme of many entries in the series, which is particularly pronounced in MGS and MGS2.

Video Game Caring Potential: It's entirely possible (and encouraged) to clear TTS, MGS2 and MGS4without killing a single enemy. MGS3 also falls into this, as you are only required to kill a single enemy: The Boss. In fact, the fewer enemies you kill in 3, the easier time you will have with one of the boss fights.

MPO introduces the ability to rescue prisoners and assign them as staff members in your army. PW expanded on this feature and it looks like MGSV will further expand this feature.

Vodka Drunkenski: Several of the San Hieronymo Soviet personnel, Colonel Skowronski, and Granin were shown drinking vodka a lot, and they are also all Russian (obviously). Unlike most examples of the trope however, their reasons were completely justified, due to certain incidents that were depressing or angering enough for them to require getting themselves drunk.

Voice with an Internet Connection: The Codec. Probably a fourth wall breach, although it is also implied a few instances that the Codec does have people observing what is going on.

Warp Whistle: In a few of the games, the cardboard boxes can be used to be transported to different areas.

The War Sequence: Raiden fights up to twenty mass-produced Metal Gears in MGS2, and several Gekkos in MGS4.

Warrior Heaven: Big Boss and Liquid Snake try to make this ideal on Earth by making the world into "Outer Heaven," a world where warriors will always be needed, honored and respected, although in MGS4, it appears that Big Boss' motive may have been to create a world free from the Patriots... that was certainly why Liquid Ocelot claimed to have had Outer Haven, at least.

Where the Hell Is Springfield?: With the exception of Metal Gear, it's largely averted in the canonical installments, where they not only cite specifically where the location setting(s) is/are, they even show a map or other evidences to hint where it is located.

In a neat twist on previous games' weapons progression, the first weapon pickup in MGS4 is the AK-102 assault rifle found right next to Old Snake after one of the first cutscenes, and it's the Mk.II suppressed tranquilizer pistol and suppressable lethal Operator pistol which are received next, instead of the other way around as in the past. It's markedly inferior though to the M4 Custom which you pick up not long after the pistols.

Wild Mass Guessing: Worth mentioning because some of the WMG theories are less crazy than what's canon.

War Is Hell: Largely no one is really proud of what they are doing, and only the real baddies don't suffer a lot because of it or have any real joy in what they do. Metal Gear's use of this trope is one of the most well-known uses of it in all of video games.

When It All Began: Although it's not really apparent until the end of the series, everything that happens in the Metal Gear universe has its roots in August 1964, the Virtuous Mission which sparked Operation Snake Eater and led to the creation of the Patriots.

Those are only the deepest roots of the main conflict. Some pieces of the puzzle go back to the turn of the 20th century, when the Philosophers were founded.

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